In today's competitive retail environment, merchants seek opportunities to stay competitive among growing competition. To this end, merchants have explored innovative ways of advertising and providing enhanced purchasing environments in order to attract, and retain, customers, thereby increasing sales. In addition, techniques such as cross-selling (i.e., selling an additional product or service to an existing customer) or upselling (i.e., inducing the customer to purchase more expensive items, upgrades, or add-ons) have proven effective for merchants.
Similarly, product bundling (also referred to herein as “bundling”) is a technique that has proven successful particularly in the context of electronic commerce, or e-commerce. Product bundling, as defined herein, is the creation of groups of two or more items that, as a group, may be offered for sale and thereby purchased with a single transaction. Through product bundling, merchants are not only able to reduce slow-selling inventory, but they are also able to increase product awareness, thereby increasing sales and imparting value to their customers. Currently, product bundles are offered in an ad hoc manner, leaving the merchant to question whether they are choosing the right items to bundle. In addition, current techniques for product bundling are overly cumbersome, manual processes notwithstanding the wealth of information available relating to customers' behavior on e-commerce websites and the like. In other words, merchants may not be fully utilizing the information and tools at their disposal for efficiently identifying product bundles that are the most relevant and timely bundles they can offer.